How I Came To Love the Mac

Today is the 25th birthday of the original Macintosh. It was a quarter of a decade ago that Apple aired their famous 1984 commercial during the Super Bowl and Steve Jobs announced the first successful line of computers to use a mouse.

I was seven years old at the time and didn't know anything about it. My father had an original IBM PC in our house that he bought in 1982 and I would play Friendlyware games on it. He did eventually bring a Macintosh home in 1987, and I thought that machine was pretty cool. I did the tutorial and remember clicking on the windows of a virtual building to open them up and reveal the people inside. Then there was this dog training game where I would use the mouse to hand the dog a biscuit whenever he'd do something right or I'd use it to swat him on the butt if he did something wrong (seems harsh to me in retrospect).

When I was a sophomore in high school my father gave me his old 286 laptop and I learned how to use WordPerfect 5.1 to write papers on it, which was a huge improvement over using my mother's old typewriter.

When my father offered to split the cost of a new desktop computer with me after in 1996 after I had just finished my freshman year of college, there was no question that I would get a Windows PC. I had taken a computer science course at WSU that taught me how to use MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, and the various Office programs so I was very comfortable in the Microsoft world. Macintoshes were much more of a niche computer and hardly anyone used them.

One notable exception was a good friend of mine whom I'd known since first grade, and who became my roommate when we were seniors. The first time I ever wrote a "Hello, World" program was in C with his help in my dorm room, and we were oblivious to the fact that the famous WSU riots of 1998 had just started a few blocks away. I remember making fun of him for being such a devoted loyalist to what was by that time a dying platform. We didn't yet know that the Mac had just started it's comeback, but I do remember that in my first MIS class a year earlier the instructor mentioned excitedly that Apple had just purchased NeXT, which meant the return of Steve Jobs and convinced him that Apple had turned the corner. I also remember the same guy telling us about how Java was going to be a big threat to Microsoft's desktop monopoly, so he wasn't always prescient.

In 2000, I decided I would build my own PC. By that time everyone was talking about Linux and how it was the next great threat to Microsoft, so by the end of that year I was triple-booting Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Red Hat Linux 6.2. It became common for technical people to develop a loathing for Microsoft, which had released a number of number of mockable products around that time (Windows ME, Visual Basic, etc) while a general fear of it's monopoly power grew.

I tried to switch completely to Linux, even rebuilding my employer-issued laptop with it, which was actually pretty natural because I worked in Unix environments. I think Becky gave it a week or two of really trying to see if she could switch with me, but the additional struggle to get anything to work like it did on Windows frustrated her and eventually she became accustomed to rebooting the home PC into Windows whenever she needed to use it.

By 2004 my love affair with Linux as a desktop platform was basically over. I had started using Eclipse to write Java code with, and it was far more stable on Windows, plus Linux couldn't manage to put my laptop to sleep when I'd close the lid. I never really grew to like Windows, but I used tools like Cygwin that helped me not to hate it. When I built my second PC I just set it up exclusively with XP.

I still was a big fan (and remain so) of Linux as a server platform. When I built my own website when Kyla was born I used my old desktop running Fedora to host it.

In 2000 I remember seeing some screenshots of the new Mac OS X online and being blown away by just how pretty everything looked compared to the drab grayness of Windows. When some of my coworkers and I went to Comp USA in 2001 and played with new computers running Windows XP and OS X, there was no question which operating system was more impressive to us. Later I had a couple of coworkers who brought their Powerbooks to the office and I was drooling when they'd show me even little things like Expose. At one point I borrowed one of them to make Becky a photo book for Valentine's Day using iPhoto.

But in the end, what made me decide that I just had to have a Mac was becoming a parent. When Becky was pregnant I bought a digital camcorder and the Roxio Easy Media Creator software suite. I took some footage of my brother's high school graduation and used the software to edit it into a cute little movie, though the process was long and the software felt pretty unstable. I also tried to add a song to it that I had purchased legally but that didn't work so I downloaded the same song using Kazaa, which gave me the additional gift of spyware.

Then in 2005 I decided it was time for me to buy an iPod, which I eventually did, but while I was in the Apple Store I was checking out iMovie on one of the Macs... and was totally blown away. It had a far more intuitive interface then anything I had used before and much better features like adding still photos and panning over them (known as the Ken Burns effect).

Becky and I had just started living on one income and the last computer I built was only a year old, but she quickly realized that this was something I just had to have, and green-lit the purchase.

Since then I've stopped using Windows completely, except for within a virtual machine. The Mac just feels so much more elegant and powerful that Windows just irritates me. In the interest of full disclosure I must admit that I've never spent more than five minutes with Vista, but nothing I've heard suggests to me that it's going to change my mind.

I don't know if my enthusiasm has rubbed off on others or if it's just the trend, but many of my family and friends have switched recently as well and no one has been disappointed. I've become the tech support guy for many of these switchers, but the ability to control someone else's desktop via iChat makes it far less of a hassle.

I think that Apple's resurgence is proving to be good for Microsoft because some of the new features of Windows 7 appear to have been inspired by OS X and the early reviews of the beta have been very positive, but I doubt they'll ever get me to come back.

Goodbye to an Old Friend

The morning newspaper has been a daily part of my life since 1995, when I'd pick up The Daily Evergreen to keep up with the latest goings-on at WSU.

When I moved to the Seattle area, I lived with my parents and read their copy of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer every morning, which I've always felt was a pretty good paper (though I didn't have a strong basis for comparison), and when I moved into my own apartment with Becky, I started my own subscription. It was my companion every morning with breakfast (I'm very loyal to my rituals).

Over the past few years, I've regularly had internal debates as to whether I should keep my subscription active. I kept hearing how newspapers were struggling to compete with the Internet and that Craig's List had killed their most reliable stream of revenue. I'm a technology geek, so I felt like I should migrate to online news, not to mention the guilt I felt for all of those dead trees (I always recycle, but still).

Of course I did embrace online news a long time ago, but it just felt awkward to have a laptop next to my cereal bowl instead of a traditional newspaper. Having my kids with me at breakfast only increased my concern for my laptop's safety. However over the last several months I've grown quite comfortable reading news on my iPhone via the New York Times' and AP's custom applications, the latter of which draws local news via the P-I and The Seattle Times.

The last straw was when the P-I had to go from five sections to three, hiding the local and business sections within the others. I respect their need to cut costs in this market, but I was irritated nevertheless and vowed that my iPhone would become my new breakfast companion.

Before I had the satisfaction of canceling (actually just not renewing), the P-I announced that they were basically closing up shop (their chances of finding a buyer that will keep printing it is zilch). For the most part this saddens me because I still intended to read it online, and any job losses are bad for the overall economy.

Some of these out of work journalists will find success in new media, but most of them probably won't. I'm curious to see what the landscape for news will look like after this revolution has played itself out. Let's hope that blogs and rumor sites, which are great for what they are, don't supplant hard news sites with high editorial standards.

Will I Miss iWeb?

I just read an article at Macworld about iLife '09 that mentions that iWeb received little attention in this release. Part of me is actually pleased because I really feel like I should moving away from that app, so it's nice to know that Apple agrees.

Since I started using iWeb, I've had something of a love/hate relationship with it. Before I moved to it, the family blog was on Blogger and our photos were on Flickr. Becky was never thrilled with that setup and told me she preferred the Lasserre's site, which was created with iWeb and had all of it's content on a central site.

Already a fan of everything Apple, I migrated everything to iWeb. The blog was pretty but kind of cumbersome and I began writing the entries as RTF files using TextEdit, which meant that any edits to a posted entry required me to change the RTF file and then recopy it to iWeb.

Moving our online photo library from Flickr to iWeb was clearly a downgrade, though my hopes were raised when Apple introduced the .Mac Web Galleries, which were integrated with iPhoto '08. The galleries looked really good, however they weren't really integrated into iWeb, so I just created links from my photos page to the individual galleries. All the while I was missing the community aspect of Flickr.

As soon as Phil Schiller mentioned that iPhoto '09 would support exporting to Flickr, I knew it was time for me to dump the Web Galleries and migrate back. I'm guessing it will just be a simple export and not support syncing, but that's pretty much what I have today with the Web Galleries.

I'll also be moving the family blog back to Blogger. I've enjoyed the ability to drag and drop photos into the iWeb blog, but that's the only nice thing I have to say about it. Blogger allows me to use tags and is more likely to get serendipitous visitors. I'm writing this entry on MarsEdit which gives me a nice desktop app to write with but the blog posts themselves live in the cloud.

I'm not abandoning iWeb entirely, hovenkotter.com will still take visitors to that homepage, but I will provide links from there to Flickr and Blogger. Hopefully this will result in a nice compromise between having a nice centralized site for the family with the content out on sites with communities.

Also I'm trying to figure out how to leverage Facebook more to drive traffic to these sites. I don't think that I get a lot of visits from my family or friends because they don't really know when I make updates, and I don't feel comfortable spamming them when I do. Most everyone I know who I think would be a good audience uses Facebook, so having updates to the blog or my photos appear in my feed seems like a natural and nonintrusive way to encourage people to check them out.

I spend more time working on my family's online presence more than anyone else I know, mainly because I enjoy it. It just seems silly to put so much effort into something where hardly anyone really sees it.

Hovenkotter Website Version 4.0?

The Macworld 2009 keynote is now behind us, and while most of the tech pundits are reacting with disappointment, I am quite pleased.  It is interesting to hear about new hardware products, but I'm not in the market to buy any new computers in the near future (given the current economic climate I'm sure I'm not alone), but I'm a big user of iLife and that suite hasn't been updated for a year and a half.

Back in April 2007, right before Blake was born, I switched away from using Blogger and Flickr to iWeb based on Becky's feedback about our site.  Before then hovenkotter.net (I eventually gave up on that domain figuring that .com would be more memorable) pointed to this blog and in the margins were links to my Flickr page.  She wanted more of a traditional site, and iWeb was the most logical choice.

After Apple announced the Web Galleries, I moved our photos to that given that it was a much better enduser experience.  However they never integrated with iWeb very well, so I just created links from our central site to them.

Now iPhoto '09 has gained the ability to integrate with Flickr (there have been third party plugins to do this for you before, but plugins aren't officially supported in iPhoto, so they made me nervous) as well as Facebook.  I've missed the community features of Flickr a lot since I stopped using it, so I think I'll migrate back to it.  I am a little nervous about Flickr's future given that Yahoo isn't doing really well these days and many of the Flickr people have been laid off, but it is still the premiere photo sharing site.

The Facebook integration is also cool.  I don't think I get a lot of traffic to hovenkotter.com, but whenever I upload anything to Facebook I know it gets viewed and I usually get comments on it too.  Over the past six months my usage of Facebook has gradually increased to the point where I typically check out my feed about once a day and update my profile several times per week.

I'm not sure what to do about the blog.  iWeb's blogger is pretty rudimentary, though I haven't seen if there are any improvements in the latest version.  It looks like you can put RSS widgets in iWeb '09 so I may just move the blog out and insert a feed of it.

Regardless I'm really pumped to get my hands on iLife '09 and I'll be handing my money over for it as soon as it's available later this month.